Reports of deceptive practices and fraud by Donald J. Trump and his Trump University business unit had been piling up for several years in states across the nation, including in Florida.
The state attorney general in New York moved in, filing a lawsuit in 2013 that accused Mr. Trump and his for-profit trade school of “engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct,” even though by that point Trump University was already out of business.
The Florida attorney general’s office, which Pam Bondi had taken over in 2011, handled it differently.
She publicly acknowledged that her office was examining complaints about Trump University, but it decided against a formal investigation.
The decision came soon after Mr. Trump, through his family foundation, sent a check for $25,000 to a political action committee associated with Ms. Bondi, who was running for a second term.
Florida’s was not the only state attorney general’s office to decide against taking up the Trump University matter. Mr. Trump also donated to Kamala Harris while she was attorney general of California, and after reviewing the matter, her office also did not pursue.
But the circumstances involved in the Florida decision will certainly be re-examined now that Ms. Bondi has been tapped for attorney general in the Trump administration.
Ms. Bondi has been a close ally of Mr. Trump for years now, including helping him with his transition to the White House after the 2016 election and defending him during his first impeachment trial in the House of Representatives.
But it is the actions by the Florida attorney general’s office during her eight years there, particularly with respect to Mr. Trump, that have drawn the greatest attention. Even Ms. Bondi acknowledged in interviews at the time that the questions related to the matter disturbed her.
“I never, nor was my office, investigating him,” Ms. Bondi told The Tampa Bay Times in 2016. “Never. I would never lie. I would never take money. I’ve been obviously devastated over this.”
A representative at Ms. Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, a Florida lobbying firm, did not respond to a request for comment. Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump transition spokesman, said the matter had already been examined.
“The Florida ethics panel cleared Pam Bondi,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “This is old, discredited news.”
Mr. Trump, as he announced he intended to nominate Ms. Bondi, said he was convinced she is the right person for the job.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans — Not anymore,” Mr. Trump said in his statement on Thursday. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime and Making America Safe Again.”
Mr. Trump, who owned 93 percent of the now-defunct university, founded it in 2004 and acted as its chief promoter rather than as a day-to-day manager. He helped sell the school as a tool of financial empowerment that would improve life for thousands of ordinary Americans. It would, he said, “teach you better than the best business school,” according to the transcript of a web video.
By 2010, after enrolling more than 4,000 students, Trump University largely ceased operations, but the complaints were only then starting to accumulate. Former students who paid up to $35,000 in tuition claimed they had been cheated through high-pressure sales techniques and false claims about what they would learn.
Mr. Trump defended the offerings. “The people that took the course all signed — most — many — many signed report cards saying it was fantastic, it was wonderful, it was beautiful,” Mr. Trump said in 2016, during a presidential debate.
But former managers of Trump University conceded in later testimony that they had employed unqualified instructors, made deceptive claims and exploited vulnerable students willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Mr. Trump’s insights.
Mr. Trump agreed in 2016 to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits, including the one brought by the New York attorney general, an agreement that included paying restitution to former students.
But questions persisted about Ms. Bondi and her office’s decision not to investigate. Separate complaints had been filed with the Florida Commission on Ethics by two Florida residents and the liberal nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“The apparent timing of decisions not to take legal action against Trump University or the Trump Institute are deeply concerning,” Citizens for Responsibility said in a statement at the time.
Florida had been one of the most popular markets for Trump University, with approximately $3.3 million in sales, according to court documents, the third highest nationwide.
As early as 2008, even before Ms. Bondi became attorney general in 2011, Florida had begun to receive complaints about Trump University, reaching a total of about two dozen. The former students sent the attorney general’s office copies of letters from collection agencies over school bills they said were unpaid, claiming that the university had not allowed them to cancel enrollment.
“I am 85 years old, and I simply cannot afford to continue paying on this hopeless scam, which has proved completely no help in any way,” one Wellington, Fla., woman wrote, in a letter sent to the attorney general’s office.
By 2013, Ms. Bondi was already preparing for her re-election the next year and she reached out to Mr. Trump in the summer to ask him to donate to her political action committee. Mr. Trump made his first small donation of $500 that summer.
The largest contribution came in September 2013, when Mr. Trump signed a $25,000 check from his family foundation to a political action committee called And Justice for All, that supported Ms. Bondi’s political causes.
That summer, aides to Ms. Bondi debated internally whether they had any recent complaints against Trump University or whether the office had ever opened an inquiry into the matter, in response to a question from a reporter.
“We have no open or closed investigations or preliminaries in our database under search parameters ‘Donald Trump, Trump University or Trump Entrepreneur Institute,” Scott Hunt, then a consumer protection investigator, wrote to one of Ms. Bondi’s top aides in August 2013, in an email first obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “As you well know, this issue is getting a lot of national coverage in the media for the last several days.”
In more than 8,000 pages of documents released by Ms. Bondi’s office in response to an open records request, there is no discussion suggesting she had any direct role in assessing a potential case against Trump University, or that she knew of the Florida complaints when she asked Mr. Trump for money.
By mid-October, Ms. Bondi’s office told reporters in Florida that it would not act on the complaints against Trump University or join the lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general.
The Florida Commission on Ethics examined the matter, and in 2017 its investigator concluded that “it may raise suspicions,” but there was no probable cause that Ms. Bondi had violated any state laws.
“There is no evidence that the respondent was involved with the investigation or decisions regarding Trump University,” wrote George Reeves, an attorney hired by the commission, referring to Ms. Bondi.
With Ms. Bondi’s pending nomination, the topic has come up again.
“Dear Senators: Ask Pam Bondi about her $25,000 donation from Trump in 2013 — right when her office decided not to prosecute Trump University,” Tristan Snell, a former assistant attorney general in New York, who worked on the Trump University case, wrote in a social media posting on Thursday night. “If she doesn’t give a good enough answer, ask more questions.”
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